My understanding of the value of a big stable of patents for an organization isn't necessarily that the patents are themselves valuable (i.e. for a product that will generate large amounts of revenue), but that they serve as legal ammunition for obtaining, say, cease-and-desist orders based on violation of patent (cf., the Apple v. Samsung case). That is, the technology the patent is for may not be valuable, but it could allow you to hamstring a competitor.
So, the more patents you own, the more likely it is that you'll have one that there is an at least plausible argument that a competitor's product violates one of them.

The first thing one (should) learn about statistics is "all that data is not information." That's the very first thing I tell my class each semester. This message is doubly resonant in this age of "Big Data". *** I was reading a post on Dell at Felix Salmon's blog, a post written by Ryan McCarth...